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December 8 - December 14, 2020
Karma is just you, repeating your patterns, virtues, and flaws until you finally get what you deserve.
Your real résumé is just a catalog of all your suffering.
When you look back and think about the interesting things you have done - most of them would have involved suffering, sacrifices and hard-work.
Most of the time, the person you have to become to make money is a high-anxiety, high-stress, hard-working, competitive person. When you have done that for twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years, and you suddenly make money, you can’t turn it off. You’ve trained yourself to be a high-anxiety person. Then, you have to learn how to be happy. [11]
You don’t get rich by spending your time to save money. You get rich by saving your time to make money.
My definition of wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions. Wisdom applied to external problems is judgment.
Picking the direction you’re heading in for every decision is far, far more important than how much force you apply.
What we wish to be true clouds our perception of what is true. Suffering is the moment when we can no longer deny reality.
It’s only after you’re bored you have the great ideas. It’s never going to be when you’re stressed, or busy, running around or rushed. Make the time. [7]
Facebook redesigns. Twitter redesigns. Personalities, careers, and teams also need redesigns. There are no permanent solutions in a dynamic system.
It’s really important to be able to uncondition yourself. Unlearn, break apart your habits and reflect on the “identity” you created if it serves you well.
For important decisions, discard memory and identity, and focus on the problem.
“You should never, ever fool anybody, and you are the easiest person to fool.” The moment you tell somebody something dishonest, you’ve lied to yourself. Then you’ll start believing your own lie, which will disconnect you from reality and take you down the wrong road.
I use my tweets and other people’s tweets as maxims that help compress my own learnings and recall them. The brain space is finite—you have finite neurons—so you can almost think of these as pointers, addresses, or mnemonics to help you remember deep-seated principles where you have the underlying experience to back it up. If you don’t have the underlying experience, then it just reads like a collection of quotes. It’s cool, it’s inspirational for a moment, maybe you’ll make a nice poster out of it. But then you forget it and move on. Mental models are really just compact ways for you to
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One theory is civilization exists to answer the question of who gets to mate. If you look around, from a purely sexual selection perspective, sperm is abundant and eggs are scarce. It’s an allocation problem.
The more closely you can tie someone’s compensation to the exact value they’re creating, the more you turn them into a principal, and the less you turn them into an agent. [12]
Principal-Agent Problem
Simple heuristic: If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term.
The means of learning are abundant—it’s the desire to learn that is scarce. [3]
The number of books completed is a vanity metric. As you know more, you leave more books unfinished. Focus on new concepts with predictive power.
To think clearly, understand the basics. If you’re memorizing advanced concepts without being able to re-derive them as needed, you’re lost.
Don’t take yourself so seriously. You’re just a monkey with a plan.
Happiness is what’s there when you remove the sense that something is missing in your life.
Memory and identity are burdens from the past preventing us from living freely in the present. [3]
The fundamental delusion: There is something out there that will make me happy and fulfilled forever.
Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.
By the time people realize they have enough money, they’ve lost their time and their health. [8]
Peace is happiness at rest, and happiness is peace in motion. You can convert peace into happiness anytime you want. But peace is what you want most of the time. If you’re a peaceful person, anything you do will be a happy activity. Today, the way we think you get peace is by resolving all your external problems. But there are unlimited external problems. The only way to actually get peace on the inside is by giving up this idea of problems. [77]
The enemy of peace of mind is expectations drilled into you by society and other people.
We’re like bees or ants. We are such social creatures, we’re externally programmed and driven. We don’t know how to play and win these single-player games anymore. We compete purely in multiplayer games. The reality is life is a single-player game. You’re born alone. You’re going to die alone. All of your interpretations are alone. All your memories are alone. You’re gone in three generations, and nobody cares. Before you showed up, nobody cared. It’s all single player.
This is why it's extremely hard to sustain doing yoga and meditation as they have not extrinsic value. Purely single player games.
At the end of the day, you are a combination of your habits and the people who you spend the most time with.
When we get something, we assume the world owes it to us. If you’re present, you’ll realize how many gifts and how much abundance there is around us at all times. That’s all you really need to do. I’m here now, and I have all these incredible things at my disposal. [8]
The more you judge, the more you separate yourself. You’ll feel good for an instant, because you feel good about yourself, thinking you’re better than someone. Later, you’re going to feel lonely. Then, you see negativity everywhere. The world just reflects your own feelings back at you. [77]
Politics, academia, and social status are all zero-sum games. Positive-sum games create positive people. [11]
Self-discipline is a bridge to a new self-image.
In any situation in life, you always have three choices: you can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. If you want to change it, then it is a desire. It will cause you suffering until you successfully change it. So don’t pick too many of those. Pick one big desire in your life at any given time to give yourself purpose and motivation.
Don’t pick too much desires because that will distract you. Less desires give you enough time to live in the present, which bring clarity of thoughts which results in peace.
When everyone is sick, we no longer consider it a disease.
Eg: mental, anxiety issues. Obesity?
The combination of sugar and fat together is really deadly. You’ve got to watch out for that in your diet.
Ironically, fasting (from a low-carb/paleo base) is easier than portion control. Once the body detects food, it overrides the brain. [11]
The advantage of meditation is recognizing just how out of control your mind is.
The ability to singularly focus is related to the ability to lose yourself and be present, happy, and (ironically) more effective. [4]
spirituality, religion, Buddhism, or anything you follow will teach you over time you are more than just your mind. You are more than just your habits. You are more than just your preferences. You’re a level of awareness. You’re a body. Modern humans, we don’t live enough in our bodies. We don’t live enough in our awareness. We live too much in this internal monologue in our heads. All of which is just programmed into you by society and by the environment when you were younger.
we’re a collection of thousands of habits constantly running subconsciously.
inspiration is perishable. When you have inspiration, act on it right then and there. [78]
Science, to me, is the study of truth and mathematics is the language of science and nature.
Social approval is inside the herd. If you want social approval, definitely go read what the herd is reading. It takes a level of contrarianism to say, “Nope. I’m just going to do my own thing. Regardless of the social outcome, I will learn anything I think is interesting.”
just being aware you’re a rat in a race is about as far as most of us are going to get. [8]
The moment you have a child, it’s this really weird thing, but it answers the meaning-of-life, purpose-of-life, question. All of a sudden, the most important thing in the Universe moves from being in your body into the child’s body. That changes you. Your values inherently become a lot less selfish. [4]
